“Pretty Little Liars” recap (1.21): This used to be a funhouse

Let me tell you what I hope, and I haven’t hoped for something like this in — ever, actually, because to everything there is a season and all that, but what I hope is that this show never ends. Like, in ten years when my kids are skirting around the living room on their hoverboards, I want to be like, “Hermione Jane and Katie F–king Fitch, I am not going to ask you again to use your inside voices! Mama is trying to watch her stories!” And my stories will be the eleventh season of Pretty Little Liars.

It’ll be a birthday party episode for Hannah’s son, probably. And the Liars will be in Hannah’s kitchen fussing over the cake and ice cream, and Hannah will be all dodgy when Aria reaches for a certain box of cookies because maybe there’s a zillion dollars in there because Hanna and Ashley have joined forces to take their thievin’ to a whole new level. And Aria will have stopped pretending her fashion sense is “avant garde” by then, so she’ll be wearing clothes from actual outer space. And Emily will be dating whatever supermodel they’ve flown in for her that month, because she may be the sweetest person in the known universe, but Emily Fields ain’t mad at the game. And Spencer maybe took up smoking during her bid for the senate, and so maybe her voice is just a wee bit more husky, which will make it that much more sexy/sinister when she reads the letter from A she found in the fridge saying that one of the party clowns has been rigged with explosives.

Oh, gods of entertainment, I haven’t asked you for anything save letting me live until the end of the Harry Potter series, but won’t you have mercy on my soul and make Pretty Little Liars immortal?

Anyway, apropos of that little fantasy, it’s time for the Rosewood Founders Festival, and apparently those revered explorers of yore were from the same psycho circus planet that boasts the birth of Pennywise the Dancing Clown. The PLLs are at dinner, trying to figure out why, exactly, JennaBot was paying Caleb to creep around Hanna’s house like some kind of Noel Kahn. Spencer is staring out the window all, “Um, someone is watching us.” Which, spoiler alert: is truer than you think, Spence. But the Liars are like, “It’s just the murdery scarecrows for the Founders Festival; calm down.” But really it’s that cop who grassed up Spencer for snogging Ian.

The PLLs lay it out their week as follows: Hanna will get the truth out of Caleb by employing her feminine wiles on him; Aria will concentrate solely on the existence of one, Ezra Fitz; Emily will find a balance between being seduced back into the closet by Paige and being drowned in the pool by Paige; and Spencer will try to neither murder nor be murdered. It’s a solid plan.

Over at Spencer’s place, Mrs. Hastings and Melissa are having tea in the kitchen and talking about whatever you talk about when you are incubating the spawn of the spawn of Satan. “He’s moving! Mother, he’s moving! Oh, I wish Ian were here to feel our baby’s trident-shaped tail thrashing against my womb!” When Spencer arrives, Mrs. Hastings explains the new PR plan, so that when Spencer inevitably goes to trial for the murder of Alison, the townspeople of Rosewood/potential jurors will remember her fondly. For starters, she’s gotta help the Rosewood First Presbyterian Church people set up for the Founders Festival. (Ed: Within the confines of Rosewood, PA and all texts concerning Rosewood, PA, it is understood that the words “presbyterian” and “church” are interchangeable with “Heaven’s Gate” and “cult.”)